> It's not like they actively took more than they "should have" from anyone directly
And who do you think exactly contributed to the over financialization of everything? Every single thing, good or bad, is a direct result of the actions of the generation before. We can thank them for creating a world where women get to vote but also criticize them for creating a world where everything costs a million dollars and all young people can earn is pennies. At any point in time they could’ve been like “this may not in my selfish interest, but it will ensure the future generations can have the same life as i do” and pushed for policies accordingly. But that didn’t happen.
Has any society ever behaved that way? It's already a push to get people to think of the middle/lower classes during the present.
I understand the desire to find an entity or group of people to blame, but they were acting in their own self interest at a peak time, they didn't know the party would be over soon, for many of them, it still isn't.
> And who do you think exactly contributed to the over financialization of everything? Every single thing, good or bad, is a direct result of the actions of the generation before.
Some elements of the generation before. It's is exceedingly unhelpful the blame an entire generation for the actions of a few. There were some elite people with a plan, many more who bought the propaganda they were served, and a lot who had nothing to do with any of it.
Also, it's worth noting (to help build empathy) that you and me likely have been suckered by propaganda for things that the next generation will curse us for, but we just think we're being sensible and informed.
The least you could do is blame an ideological faction of that generation (e.g. neoliberals), rather than blaming the whole generation itself. Among many advantages, that names the problem in a way that can solve it.
> It's is exceedingly unhelpful the blame an entire generation for the actions of a few.
The unfortunate reality is that every generation has the power to change things if they want to. Shifting the blame to the actions of the few is an easy way to absolve yourself of the blame. Who allows the few to take those actions? How did those few come into power to be able to take those actions? Once the actions were taken, why were they not corrected if the entire generation disagreed with them?
Maybe in the future the generations will blame my generation for a bunch of wrongs, even if I personally may not have contributed to those wrongs, I will still share the burden of not doing enough to prevent it.
> The unfortunate reality is that every generation has the power to change things if they want to.
That's an illusion. I think what you're really doing is putting unreasonable demands on the entire baby boomer generation, then blaming them for not succeeding at an impossible task. I mean, seriously, you really think, say, some boomer factory worker in Ohio is to blame for not foreseeing the effects of some 1980-era policy on 2026 or even 2006? They didn't have the benefit of the hindsight that we have.
It sounds like you're really holding tight onto blame, but what good does that do you? It solves no problems, and at best, alienates people from you.
Yes. The effects of 1980s policy was talked about endlessly and everywhere, to the point childhood me understood the coming effects. I used to joke to my parents my generation was going to create old people homes attached to factories to make them pay us back.
He buys twitter at an inflated valuation. Runs it to the ground to a much lower valuation of $9B. [1] Then, his company Xai buys Twitter at a $33B, inflating the valuation up. Then SpaceX merges with Xai for no particular reason, but is expected to IPO at a $1T+ in the upcoming years. [3]
I’m not that smart, but if I were, I would be thinking this is an extended way to move the losses from the Twitter purchase on to the public markets.
It also makes it impossible for Twitter/X to die, as it deserves. It is by far the most toxic mainstream social network. It has an overwhelming amount of far right supremacist content. So bad that it literally resulted in Vivek Ramaswamy, a gubernatorial candidate in Ohio, to quit Twitter/X - nearly 100% of replies to his posts were from far right racists.
Obviously advertisers have not been fans. And it is a dying business. But rather than it dying, Elon has found a clever (and probably illegal) way to make it so that SpaceX, which has national security importance, is going to prop up Twitter/X. Now our taxpayer dollars are paying for this outrageous social network to exist.
I find HN and the tech circles to be one of the main community pillars holding up X. None of my social friends use it anymore, but links absolutely abound here, and it seems like the standard line is to pretend Elon, Grok, all the one button revenge and child porn etc don’t exist. I truly can’t fathom the amount of not thinking about it it would take to keep using the platform.
I have a blocker set up in my browser to prevent accidental clicks and sending any traffic to them when I'm not careful to check a given HN link to a posting. I've never had an account there (nor any of the popular social media networks) but I don't want to send even my few clicks their way.
No it isn't, the sensible people you followed 5 years ago left and stopped posting. The "Your followers" feed is now just the terminally addicted and the angry demagogues.
Vivek getting his face eaten by the leopard while running for the "leopards eating OTHER people's faces" party isn't really something I feel we should sad about.
> Obviously advertisers have not been fans. And it is a dying business. But rather than it dying, Elon has found a clever (and probably illegal) way to make it so that SpaceX, which has national security importance, is going to prop up Twitter/X. Now our taxpayer dollars are paying for this outrageous social network to exist.
There is a difference between a dying business and and influential one though. Twitter is dying, but it is still influential.
It was easy to support SpaceX, despite the racist/sexist/authoritarian views of its owner, because he kept that nonsense out of the conversation.
X is not the same. Elon is actively spewing his ultraconservative views on that site.
Now that these are the same company, there's no separation. SpaceX is part of Musk's political mission now. No matter how cool the tech, I cannot morally support this company, and I hope, for the sake of society, it fails.
This announcement, right after the reveal that Elon Musk reached out to Jeffrey Epstein and tried to book a trip to Little St. James so that he could party with "girls", really doesn't bode well.
It's a shame you can't vote these people out, because I loved places like Twitter, and businesses like SpaceX and Tesla, but Elon Musk is a fascist who uses his power and influence to attack some of the most important pillars of our society.
Elon has spent months and months calling for the Epstein files to be released, even had a big spat with Trump over that and some other things. The idea that he was actually raping girls with Epstein can only be believed by people who will believe anything if it puts their enemies in a bad light. Which are also generally the same people making fake emails and sharing them to defame people they dislike, or editing family photos to pretend they were abuse.
So why was Elon begging to visit Epstein island years after Epstein was already convicted and sentenced and registered as a sex offender? That’s what the emails obtained by the DOJ show - Elon reaching out to Epstein to ask about when the “wildest party” would be. Let’s not be naive - he was asking to attend parties for the obvious reason.
Trump himself, one of Epstein's most frequent fliers, was at one time one of the most openly vocal supporters of releasing the files when it was politically convenient for him to do so. He knew he was prominent in those files, but had no real intention of actually releasing them if he could help it. Elon is no different. When it was convenient to be outspoken about it, he did, despite knowing his name was included.
Elon is moderate at best. If a democrat supported cutting the budget, having an actual border to the country, and keeping men out of women's bathrooms you'd get Elon.
Check out his X feed. He regularly posts unhinged things about white culture, western values, etc that are supremacist and often, lifted from other supremacists. In the last year he became far more radicalized towards the far right. If it was just the things you said I might agree.
Toxic = Not a progressive echo chamber. It takes serious blinders to think Twitter is dying any more than the myriad of tech companies operating at losses. And rather than liberals sucking it up and engaging in open disagreements and fire, or attempting tl correct the far right in any way, they flee to blueski (which is actually not doing well). It really is pathetic.
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not conservative, I dont particularly care for Elon or X or this merger. I just despise intellectual dishonesty and selective outrage.
The only intellectual dishonesty is “blaming it on the libs” argument. Ignoring the partisan arguments, the platform was quite literally being used by users to undress women and produce CSAM. [1] Just one of the many examples where you can argue the platform is toxic.
The problem is that you/they were calling it toxic long before grok was integrated, and I think you knew that. Hence the accusation of dishonesty, proven in full view for all to see.
> It also makes it impossible for Twitter/X to die, as it deserves. It is by far the most toxic mainstream social network. It has an overwhelming amount of far right supremacist content.
Twitter also has more (not total, but more) free speech than any other social networking site. For example, you are allowed to discuss empirical research on race, crime and IQ. That would get you rate limited or banned quickly on other websites, including HN.
Apparently my previous reply got shadow banned by HN. Oh the irony. To repeat: the ban of cis was a reaction to the previous ban of t_r_a_n_n_y. If you are fine with the latter ban you should be fine with the former.
You can happily say all sorts of vile things - every slur that exists - about every minority on Twitter and not face any issues. But not cis. Why do you think that is? Does that sound like free speech or a biased far right platform manipulating users?
Apple autocorrect has gotten actually worse over the last decade. Before it used to be duck instead of a similar sounding word and it took one action to correct it. Now it’s just fuschia and it takes 5 mins to correct the correction to the autocorrect.
I agree with this sentiment. It was so annoying that I turned auto correct off. I found that writing on iPhone has got worse as well, or at least it's my own observation. On the other hand, voice dictation has improved quite a bit that I can just dictate into my phone when needed. For more serious work I use a work device not a consumption one.
Our neighborhood park maintenance volunteers are 80% old ladies in their 70s and 80s. Without things to do, body and mind atrophies. While it’s true that increasing number of people are having to work longer than they need to, a lot of them don’t do it out of necessity and is probably the reason why they’re still alive and kicking at that age.
> Fake would imply that the people releasing the population estimates have a much better estimate but are choosing to instead publish a made up number
Fake simply means not genuine. It doesn’t require the people reporting it to have a real estimate. It simply requires the people reporting it to just not try finding the real number.
Not even that. If I give you a fake number (by whatever definition) and you report it... the number is still fake, regardless of whether you had any inkling it might be, or whether you tried to verify it in any way.
I'm trying to think of a definition, and the best I can come up with is this: fake means the number was modified at some point without an auditable trail. For example, if I see 1 deer on a sq km and I extrapolate linearly to a 100 sq km area that there are 100 deer in that area, then the number is fake if I don't disclose the extrapolation -- and this is true even if the actual number is in fact 100 in reality.
Actually, I don't even think this covers all the bases, because it assumes there was an initially factual measurement. For example, if it that one observed deer was in fact a statue, the numbers are all fake even if everyone documented everything and acted in good faith and accidentally came up with true correct number at the end...
How can any estimate, even a very poor estimate, be not genuine if there isn't a known better estimate? If I estimate there are 8 alien civilizations in the milky way it may be a truly terrible estimate, and the methods by which I came up with that estimate (eg one per galactic arm) may not stand up to any rigorous scrutiny, but it's as genuine an estimate as any other. To be not genuine, there must be something that is genuine, which it is not.
You don't need to necessarily know the right answer to have a fake estimate, but you have to be doing something to the estimate that you know is making it worse, which is equivalent to having the estimate where you didn't do that, which would be better.
Since the HN reaction to layoffs almost always is about blaming H1B, here’s a few more things the headline misses:
1. Cuts were global
2. Cuts in US also include H1B employees
3. 16000 roles are corporate roles, not just tech related, H1B program is not generally utilized for those roles
4. Expansion in India is not just tech. Amazon is a big retailer in India. Understandably if you’re seeing revenue growth in India, you will grow corporate presence in India. If Walmart becomes a massive retailer in EU, it will hire EU nationals in EU. That’s not shipping jobs to EU.
> 1. Cuts were global 2. Cuts in US also include H1B employees
Hell no, Amazon has been a top 10 filer of H1-B LCAs for decades. The only H1-Bs being laid off, if any, are the older ones (over 39) to be replaced with cheaper models
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS8LNhxJq9Q
That keeps the facilities here, the local employment options here, the growth here, the tax base here...
We should want more smart people moving to this country. More business creation, more capital, more labor, more output.
Immigration is total economic growth for America, non zero-sum. Offshoring is not only economic loss, but second order loss: we lose the capacity over an extended time frame.
I want the loopholes on H1Bs to be closed. H1B is a great concept to get foreign talent that found domestically. But these days is a shell game that's turned into a way to put shackles on employees who can't job hop. It hurts both groups in the long run.
> want the loopholes on H1Bs to be closed. H1B is a great concept...
There are no loopholes on H1B, it's working exactly as it was intended - replace, not just supplement - American workers with cheaper, more obedient tech slave workers dependent of their master-employer for their survival.
Several of the links of yours are about PERM applications, not H1B.
I agree abusers (employers) should be put on he H1B visa blacklist which already exists.
H1B already mandates that employees be paid within the wage window of their peers. And anecdotally I know several who make more than their citizen peers in the same company same level
Not fully, the problem is much deeper than compensation. Let's not have large companies game around the slots allotted and using various means to get more slots. And put some serious enforcement on how they justify their H1b's to begin with as a start.
> Shouldn't we all want H1B rather than offshoring?
That's my opinion.
However there are issues with who's sucking the tit. If you bring in a bunch of people from outside instead of hiring locals that's not a win for the locals. On the other hand whats the difference for someone in San Francisco if Apple hires a guy from India vs New Jersey? Not much.
And H1B visa's can be low grade indentured servitude.
I am not so sure on that. They raise inflation, home prices, etc. The locals see no real benefit except having to pay more for everything. While more taxes are collected, most of that goes to offsetting just some of the economic pain induced by the people living there.
and it is in fact zero sum. every spot filled in university or company is a spot not taken by a local, as its obvious by the numbers, more local people are not getting admitted into CS programs nor are they being hired. its 100% zero sum when we are looking at these numbers and %s.
If you don't bring more fungible labor into the US, the jobs will be offshored.
Look at what just happened to film labor in 2022-2023. The industry was burgeoning off the heels of the streaming wars and ZIRP. Then the stikes happened.
Amazon and Netflix took trained crews in the Eastern Europe bloc and leveraged tax deals and existing infra in Ireland and the UK. Film production in LA and Atlanta are now down over 75%. Even with insane local tax subsidies - unlimited subsidies in the case or Georgia.
Software development will escape to other cheaper countries. They're talented and hard working. AI will accelerate this.
Then what? America lost manufacturing. I think we've decided that was a very bad idea.
We need to move the cheaper labor here. More workforce means more economic opportunities for startups and innovation. Labor will find a way as long as the infrastructure is here.
De-growth is cost cutting and collapse. Immigration is rapid growth, diversification, innovation, and market dominance.
All those people start buying from businesses here. They start paying taxes here. It supercharges the local economy. Your house might go up in price, but way more money is moving around - more jobs, more growth, second order effects.
America doesn't have the land limits Canada has. And we can set tax policy and regulations to encourage building.
I'd rather be in an America forecasted to hit 500 million citizens - birth or immigration. And I want to spend on their education. I want capital to fund their startup ideas. I want the FTC/DOJ to break up market monopolies to create opportunity for new risk takers and labor capital.
That was the world the Boomers had. Exciting, full of opportunity. That was the world of a rapidly industrializing America.
Right now, the world we have ahead looks bleak. People aren't having kids and we aren't bringing in immigrants. We'll have less consumerism, less labor, and everything will shrink and shrivel and be less than it was.
> If you don't bring more fungible labor into the US, the jobs will be offshored.
Offshoring is not always a substitute for an employee chained to the job by a visa. I'm sure you can get a million and one anecdotes here on HN about the perils of working across timezones, cultures, and legal systems.
If you really think that companies are moving out of country because "there's not enough talent", despite having some of the more relaxed tax codes and most talented universities here: well, sure. That would be hopeless. It also sounds like you're buying snake oil.
They had decades to off shore, and they chose not to. I don't think Ai in the near term (<15 years) is going to change that dial much. If they do leave, there's plenty of talent to fill the void.
> If you really think that companies are moving out of country because "there's not enough talent", despite having some of the more relaxed tax codes and most talented universities here
The US has a huge delta between its great universities and its mediocre ones. There are some smart and sharp kids everywhere in even the lowest ranked schools. But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low. If you ever interviewed people for a software position in a big tech firm, you'd realize this.
>The US has a huge delta between its great universities and its mediocre ones. There are some smart and sharp kids everywhere in even the lowest ranked schools. But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low. If you ever interviewed people for a software position in a big tech firm, you'd realize this.
I'm convinced that the code screen functions as a somewhat arbitrary filter/badge of honor.
FAANG and equivalents get tens of thousands of applicants and they cannot hire them all
If too many pass the code screen, they will just make it harder, even though the job hasn't gotten any more difficult.
Or they get failed at system design. Which is BS in many cases.
It's a necessary filter. Again, you need to interview candidates for these jobs to understand. Our industry doesn't have any qualifications, any exam to pass to certify, so there are just a ton of people who can't do the basic job but think they are qualified because we don't have a good way to screen people for this work.
>The US has a huge delta between its great universities and its mediocre ones.
Like any other country, yes.
>But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low. If you ever interviewed people for a software position in a big tech firm, you'd realize this.
Compared to India? Or is it fine to lower standards of quality when you are paying an 8th of the cost and it turns out most people don't need to be from MIT to contribute?
That's perfectly fine and dandy. But that's not what H1Bs are for.
H1Bs aren't paid 1/8 their counterparts in the same company.
And no, the same applies to India and to China but because the number is small here we pick the small numbers from the rest of the world as well. We don't only hire people from India and China in tech they are just more populous countries so their best workers are far more numerous.
Go to any FAANG in the US and you will see people on H1B from all over Europe, Africa, South America, etc. but Indians and Chinese are the largest group because they are the largest population countries with established pipelines from schools there to schools here to jobs here.
>We don't only hire people from India and China in tech they are just more populous countries so their best workers are far more numerous.
So we are talking H1Bs. Does that mean this small pool of "best foreign talent" also all happen to speak English and are able to communicate their ideas on a team?
>the same applies to India and to China but because the number is small here we pick the small numbers from the rest of the world as well.
Well you're already shifting your point:
> But altogether the amount of people who can pass a code screen in the US is pretty low.
You're criticizing America as an excuse to find people overseas and bring them in. Thanks for proving the fact that H1B is being abused.
So you're telling me your fine taking the time to find the finest H1B workers but not Americans?
If we have say 1M job openings in a field, and only 250k American citizens can pass a screen for that job, then we need to find other people for it, no? Those people will be likely to most common from the most populous countries in the world...
You could use this exact argument to say nobody should ever have children-- children also raise inflation, home prices, etc. And the majority of your property taxes go specifically towards programs which would be unneeded if nobody had any children.
The fact that naive anti-immigration arguments can be copy-pasted unchanged into arguments against having children is a sign that maybe those arguments are stupid. To understand why, you might start with the fact that immigrants also purchase goods and services, and hence pay the salaries of the ~70% of people in this country employed in some way or another by consumer spending.
Children are future taxpayers the majority with parents who were not a tax burden --net positive tax contribution. People without Children benefit from the taxes paid by the children of people who rear children -i.e. people without children aren't "cashing out" their tax contributed retirement --that contribution went to other retirees.
And citizens benefit from the taxes paid by non-citizen immigrants, whether documented or undocumented. Not just income and payroll taxes that might be dodged by under-the-table arrangements, but sales taxes, property taxes (perhaps paid indirectly via rent to a taxpaying landlord), the consumer share (nearly 100%) of tariffs, etc. And much of that tax base is spent on benefits and services that are not accessible to taxpaying non-citizens.
So from that standpoint, immigrants are a /better/ economic deal for the public than children are. At the end of the day, though, it shouldn't matter where people were born if they're contributing to society, and the grandparent post is 100% correct that the whole debate is stupid.
Oh, in that case no w-2 employee pays income taxes, their employer does. I guess we’re all just mooches on society and only the company owners do anything.
No, they just pay sales tax and other taxes on use. I was being sarcastic because you are fundamentally incorrect and as the other comment said, engaging in sophistry.
Grade school math. Look at income tax receipts: the top 5% pay >61% of all income taxes.
You can try and split hairs with "sales taxes" and "payroll taxes" and try to shimmy things into some anti-capitalist stance ("but the companies benefit from their labor!!!," "renters pay property taxes indirectly!"), but the overwhelming majority of all tax payments come from a small percentage of individuals.
Why does this matter? The government spends X dollars each fiscal year, divided by the number (N) of people. Most people aren't paying X/N.
The government would not be able to fund every social program or services if it weren't for these receipts, which, most people cannot afford to pay. Even 100% of the majority of salaries can't cover this amount.
> Why does this matter? The government spends X dollars each fiscal year, divided by the number (N) of people. Most people aren't paying X/N.
It matters because we don't know if these people are being taxed more proportionately or less. Like, Elon Musk pays more tax than you or I, but he probably pays at a much lower rate.
What you don't want (from an equity and fairness perspective) is for people with more money to pay a lower rate of tax. That will cause problems.
From a total population perspective, given some amount of money S it doesn't really matter who pays it (except for downstream impacts around fairness and elections).
However, your original point was:
> The vast majority of adults and their children will never pay their tax burden proportionately.
I would argue that this is incorrect, everyone pays some proportion of their income in income/sales/property/estate taxes. And really, your point about who pays the majority of US federal taxes doesn't actually support your point.
Finally, I would note that I mostly replied because I really hate those top x% comparisons as they're deceptive without looking at the proportion of income earned.
> Government could not afford to provide the services they provide if these taxes weren't paid, full stop.
Of course they could. Taxation is not necessary in the short term for a government to provide services (especially if we're talking about the US which both issues its own currency and benefits from massive foreign demand for its debt).
Over the long term, taxation needs to at least pay back the debt but that long-term appears to be much longer than I would have expected (when was the last time the US government ran a surplus?).
Immigrants pay social security taxes, unemployment taxes, ... that they also will never be able to benefit from. Those are purely for the benefit of US citizens
There is a good case for vetted legal immigration (there is need and they fill that unmet need), no question; however, that should not be at the expense of the local population, regardless of country. In other words, the locals should not suffer a depressed job market because of immigration. The whole reason for a state to exist is to first and foremost look after the wellbeing of its citizens that elect the bodies of government.
I'm not sure where you're getting that from in my comment. I never said US citizens should want H1Bs for everyone with zero vetting, only that they are a net tax positive.
It's not a dichotomy of maintaining the status quo or getting rid of H1b completely. At least in big tech companies, they do follow labor market tests and prevailing wage tests and so on that are designed to vet that there is an unmet need and that visa holders aren't underpaid. I won't deny there are visa mills and consultancies that game the system and pretty much explicitly just hire cheap foreign labor, but this is a thread about H1B in the context of Amazon layoffs, not InfoSys layoffs.
It depends if the immigrant is hired because the native worker is deemed too expensive. In this case, it contributes to reducing contributions through wage suppression.
If you have access to data that shows big tech is preferentially hiring visa holders over US citizens you should get on that class action lawsuit right away. That's probably hundreds of thousands or even millions per person in lost wages, and even after lawyers take their 30% cut, that's still a sizable chunk.
It's anecdata, but a college friend who now works at as a manager in an IT/Data consultancy in my birth country in the EU told me bluntly that they prioritized hiring foreigners as they were 20% cheaper.
Given that the company sponsors them and come from lower incomes countries, they are ready to accept lower wages. If they do it I don't see why everyone wouldn't be doing the same.
It's of course hard to prove formally as those companies will comply with regs to make it look like they aren't discriminating (fake job ads, etc...). By the way in the US Indian consultancies got busted for this.
Based on the "Worst Case Housing Needs: 2025 Report to Congress" released in late 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found that foreign-born population growth accounted for approximately two-thirds of the increase in nationwide rental demand between 2021 and 2024.
Of course. In any growing services-based economy you will have foreign born population growth. If you eliminate that population growth, economic growth will decline with it.
If we were a growing manufacturing-based economy that wouldn't be the case as much.
Yep. The negativity around H-1Bs is centered around using them for low/mid-level roles in the pursuit of wage suppression, racial/caste discrimination with hiring managers abusing the system to get their friends in, and the tech industry unnecessarily hogging them when we really need them in niche industries (e.g. nuclear engineering).
Trump made the cost change some months ago to address those concerns but I haven’t seen any studies showing whether or not those changes had a positive effect or not.
Because they can hire 5 programmers in India for the cost of 1 in America, and American programmers aren't 5x better than Indian ones ? Amazon is an online shop, not a jobs program. I'm sure they would rather eliminate a position altogether even more than sending it to India.
We should want open borders. Immigration is a significant net positive. But we can settle for controlled immigration with liberal limits.
H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.
> H1-B is stupid on its face. You're seriously telling me that this software engineering job absolutely cannot be filled by an American? That doesn't pass the laugh test.
The job description is a senior full stack product developer fluent in all programming languages and frameworks. Salary is $70,000/year. Somehow they can never find Americans to fill those jobs. They'll go on Linkedin complaining that Americans are too lazy and don't have the right hustle culture and talk about made up concepts like work life balance when the bosses demand 100 hour work weeks without overtime pay.
That seems low. Is it a corporate strategy to set a low salary and when nobody local fills it (because it's below the competitive rate) they get to hire H1-B?
No, because H1B has pay requirements. As someone who went through the process with Amazon I can confirm that they definitely do offer you a salary that is in line with the local market. There might be lower incentive for raises down the line, but that's a conspiracy theory at best
By law. H1b requires the wages to be greater than the prevailing wage for similar positions in the region. They are published by DoL: https://flag.dol.gov/wage-data/wage-search
For this kind of experience, you'd be looking for level 2 _minimum_ and likely level 3. For King County in WA it's right now $149240 and $180710 respectively. Level 4 wage is $212202, btw.
The H1B requirements are even higher, but also WA state law requires software developer salaries to be 3.5 x minimum wage x 52 weeks per year. Currently, that is $124k+, because minimum wage is $17.13 per hour.
Our competitors in another country will have no problem building those products.
Then they'll be sold in America to American consumers.
Then our industry deflates, because we can't compete on cost or labor scale / innovation.
If we put up tariffs, we get a short respite. But now our goods don't sell as well overseas in the face of competition. Our industries still shrink. Eventually they become domestically uncompetitive.
So then what? You preserved some wages for 20 years at the cost of killing the future.
I think all of these conversations are especially pertinent because AI will provide activation energy to accelerate this migration. Now is not the time to encourage offshoring.
Immigration isn't "shipping the job to India". It's bringing the labor here and contributing to our economy. This might have a suppressive force on wages, but it lifts the overall economy and creates more opportunity and demand.
Offshoring is permanent loss. It causes whatever jobs and industry are still here to atrophy and die. The overall economy weakens. Your outlook in retirement will be bleaker.
If you have to pick between the two, it's obvious which one to pick.
And that's the general problem. People don't care about the overall economy when wages are going down and cost of living is going up. Even myself, I couldn't care less about the overall health of the economy. I care about being able to subsist mine and my family's life style, put food on the table, someday own a home, not live paycheck to paycheck because all the jobs are paying below a living wage, etc.
I'm extremely fortunate to make the salary that I do, but I know plenty of others not so fortunate, in other fields that don't pay nearly as well as tech does, and probably never will. The answer can't be "go into tech" nor should it be "let's suppress wages so labor isn't so expensive for our domestic companies." And obviously offshoring isn't great either.
We can still import talent without suppressing wages, by not abusing the program and actually only importing for roles that truly, beyond all reasonable doubt, could not be filled by a domestic worker.
Usually the next step of this failed discourse is to explain that locals are so entitled that they don't want to do hard jobs for the minimum wage, due to decades of wage suppression done thanks to immigration.
In France, being a cook used to pay very well, now that most cooks in Paris are from India or Sri Lanka, often without a proper visa or at the minimum wage, no local wants to do this anymore (working conditions are awful).
The industry then whines loudly about "the lack of qualified (cheap) workers"
Turns out this is a difficult problem with no one good solution. Subjecting labor to a race to the bottom is probably the most efficient individual system from a capitalist standpoint, but it destroys itself just as much as your customers can no longer afford to buy most of the products made. The selfish strategy ruins the entire system if everybody does it.
Capitalism and Communism have opposite problems. Communism attempts to manage the markets from a top down approach, making it relatively easy to handle systemic problems but almost impossible to optimize for efficiency because there is far too much information that doesn't make it to the top. Capitalism by contrast pushes the decisions down to where the information is, allowing for excellent efficiency but leaving it blind to systemic problems.
So the best solution is some kind of meet in the middle approach that is complex and ugly and fosters continual arguments over where lines should be drawn.
Innovation is why american salaries in tech are so high. They funded trillion dollar companies.
If that becomes so much of a commodity that some other countries can do it for pennies on the dime, then yes. Salaries will deflate. But we sure aren't offshoring (nor using most H1bs) to see more innovation. Quite the opposite.
Tech isn't manufacturing where the biggest supply line wins by default. That's why I'm not holding my breath that the US isn't going to be outcompeted on talent anytime soon. Of anything, its own greed will consume it.
You say "we should want open borders" then argue for something that is objectively not open borders. "Open borders" and "controlled immigration" are diametrically opposed things, regardless of whatever liberal limits you're imagining. Almost nobody is arguing for zero immigration.
Amazon is a big retailer in India, believe it or not, if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
> if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
Is that true? Could you think of some large retailers in other countries, like the United States, without a big corporate presence? What do you mean when you say "big"? 1,000 employees? 10,000? 100?
if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will not have a big corporate presence in that country.
Now it's on you to think of an example to disprove me, certainly I'm not going to think an example to disprove myself.
Do you see the problem with this pattern? I could claim all sorts of things and then say, well sorry you have to go do all this work to refute my claims. Something claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. But I really was asking whether that's true or not, because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.
> because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.
Amazon has a market share of 30-35% of ALL e-commerce in India. You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence.
Also, there is a logical fallacy here that doesn’t make sense. If I claim A is true (and for a second let’s assume is actually true), then I cannot actually have an example of A being not true. If someone else claims that A is not true, they provide evidence of A not being true, instead of demanding such evidence.
And my evidence for my claim about big retailers having big corporate presence is based on all the big online retailers like Amazon, Wlmart, Target, Best Buy, EBay and others (top 20) all having big corporate presence in the country.
> if you are a big online retailer in a country, you will have a big corporate presence in that country.
They made a general claim that a big retailer in a country will have a big corporate presence in that country. I don't know if that's true or not - hence my response.
They didn't claim that a big retailer in India will have a big corporate presence, nor did claim that a retailer approaching 35% of e-commerce must have a large corporate presence in the country. It was an ambiguous claim, which is why I asked a few follow up questions.
> You’re making claims yourself, so I’d like to see examples of companies that operate at that scale in a country without corporate presence.
I didn't make this claim so there's nothing for me to provide.
because in my mind there are a number of large online retailers that operate in the United States for example, without a large corporate presence here.
3-1-1 is rarely enforced. I always got confused why the 100ml limit existed, since I could just take multiple bottles of 100ml of whatever I wanted and it was okay. Then I realized that technically I only could take 3 bottles but I’ve been getting away with more for decades.
And who do you think exactly contributed to the over financialization of everything? Every single thing, good or bad, is a direct result of the actions of the generation before. We can thank them for creating a world where women get to vote but also criticize them for creating a world where everything costs a million dollars and all young people can earn is pennies. At any point in time they could’ve been like “this may not in my selfish interest, but it will ensure the future generations can have the same life as i do” and pushed for policies accordingly. But that didn’t happen.
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